Wreck the Halls (5 page)

“Right,” I whispered, pausing by Millie Hildreth's snow-covered formal perennial garden, where stalks of her purple “Autumn Joy” sedum poked up through the humped drifts. “Ellie, look.”

Just ahead, a fox poked its pointed nose from between the little white clapboard houses set cheek by jowl along the lower portion of Key Street. Spotting us, he veered off, his defiant cry half domestic dog's bark, half rusty hinge screeching.

Eastport is a real city, with sidewalks and streetlights. But it is also located on an island perched at the windswept, granite-cliffed edge of the back of beyond. The fox vanished into the snowy darkness.

“The blood on the gloves was dry,” I told Ellie, glancing over my shoulder as I paused to catch my breath. Across the bay, house lights on the Canadian island of Campobello twinkled whitely: half a mile, an international boundary, and a time zone away.

“Flaking, not all smeary as if they’d been in water,” I added, continuing uphill. “I doubt you could wash
anything, wearing them, and have them look that way afterwards.”

“And if she did it with the gloves off,” Ellie agreed, “why put them on again? There must’ve been a lot of washing up to do, too. You saw the things in the shop.”

The cutting tools, she meant, because it would have taken more than that one knife we’d seen falling from the daybed, to do the job. Such work had to take serious blades, I thought, heavy and sharp; not the usual kind you simply pulled from the nearest kitchen drawer. Yet Merle's butchering implements had all been spotlessly clean.

I thought of what Victor had said: If you believe you are being stalked there is probably a reason. Not necessarily a reasonable reason.

“Ellie, once you’ve done a thing like that, who knows what you’ll be thinking or doing afterwards? Maybe she changed clothes, wore three aprons, and guzzled out of those bottles like a sailor on shore leave. We don’t know what happened in that house. Maybe she’d meant to finish cleaning up, and passed out before she could.”

“I don’t think so,” Ellie maintained stubbornly. “But…”

“What?”

“Her whole plant collection,” Ellie said. “Jake, we have got to try to keep that quiet. Or at least tone it down some, if those state guys are good and pick up on it at all.”

I gazed longingly at the crest of the hill. Key Street ascended the last slope of the island before the water's edge, so steep it got your heart racing even in summer; in the winter you practically needed Sherpas. My chest was heaving and my breath came in quick, visible puffs.

“That's the other reason I want a look at these state guys,” she said, her own breathing unhurried and her step effortless. I swear, the woman was like a mountain goat. “See how smart they are.”

“Ellie,” I managed at the top, leaning forward to rest my
hands on my knees. My house was in sight, its windows warmly aglow and its chimneys dark cutouts against the stars. I had a mental flash of what it must have looked like decades earlier, illuminated by firelight and gas lamps; in those days a one-horse open sleigh was an ordinary winter vehicle, the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of four-wheel drive.

Which was exactly what I needed, if the wheels were attached to a nice, warm ambulance. My heart valves were hammering and my lungs felt like someone was pushing screwdrivers into them.

“I don’t see (gasp) how a collection of exotic plants (gasp) can influence a (gasp) case against her, one way (gasp) or another.”

Gasp. “You don’t, huh?” We climbed the porch steps. Above, a thick, sparkling row of widow-maker icicles dangled from the frozen gutter; the attic was going to need even more insulation before winter was over, I thought, adding the reinforcement of this to my already lengthy hurry-up-and-fix-it list.

“Let me ask you, then,” Ellie persisted. “What if she was accused of killing him with a shotgun, and besides that, she had a collection of knives, crossbows, and those little blow-guns they use in tropical places, to shoot poisoned darts?”

“Oh. I get it.” Inside, the standard thermostat setting of sixty-three—because the rich do get richer, but not on my back, thanks—felt like a heat wave from one of those tropical climes, after the cold outside. Steam from the simmering New England boiled dinner dripped on the inside panes of the windows, increasing the rain-forest atmosphere in the house while also encouraging quick peeling of all its wallpaper.

Wallpaper glue, I thought; a seam roller, and a new razor knife. I used to have an available short-term memory but now all I have is a mental hardware-store list.

“A lot of the plants she grows are pharmaceuticals,” Ellie told me. “And medicine's just poison in little doses, you know, no matter whether it comes from a pharmacy or out of somebody's greenhouse.” She pulled her mittens, hat, scarf, and fleece-lined jacket off. “Faye Anne doesn’t need anyone thinking that if she hadn’t killed him this way, she had other methods all ready to use.”

“You’ve got a point,” I admitted, a shiver hitting me abruptly as I stood washing my hands at the sink.

An icy draft strong enough to fly a kite on was coming in at the windows despite the caulk I’d stuffed in around them, and the floor felt like Arctic tundra. Suddenly the obvious hit me: those window sashes I’d been planning to pull out and repair, even inefficient and leaky as they were now, weren’t coming off until spring.

Not unless I wanted the kitchen floor to develop permafrost. Plastic sheeting, I thought sadly, to cover the windows in hopes of insulating them better until May. Or June. And more duct tape.

“I want to know if they’re going to figure it out,” Ellie said, putting on a pot of coffee. “I mean that there's lots more ammunition for a case against her, in that greenhouse.”

I laid a fire in the dining-room fireplace and stole woolen socks from Sam's clean laundry in the basket by the washer. “But Ellie,” I objected when I could feel my toes again. “Wouldn’t an obscure poison have been a better method?”

Monday padded in morosely and sank into her dog bed by the radiator without even bothering to turn in circles. “You poor thing,” I said, patting her, then went on:

“Why kill someone that way—messy, ugly, labor-intensive—when you’ve got a substance? Possibly an undetectable substance?” For all I knew, Faye Anne could have been growing obscure neurological toxins in that little greenhouse.

“I agree.” Ellie got the good plates out from the butler's pantry and began setting the table. “But I know what they’ll say if they find out she had plants she might’ve used to kill him: that she snapped. She planned it one way, but push came to shove so it happened another.”

I reached past her for the paper sack of tomatoes on the pantry floor. People say you can’t grow tomatoes in Eastport but what they mean is, you can’t ripen them outdoors because frost gets them first. Back in September I’d picked green tomatoes as big and hard as baseballs, and piled them into grocery bags from the IGA to sit in the darkness of the butler's pantry.

Now they were red. “Then why get dressed up for it?” I asked. “The apron and the gloves. If you didn’t plan it…”

“Right. That's the thing. You don’t put on a protective costume for something you do on the spur of the moment. On the other hand if you really have planned it, you don’t take off the protective costume until you’ve finished, do you? So none of it makes sense. Meanwhile…”

She counted on her fingers: “Digitalis. Jerusalem cherry. Castor bean. Aconitum and false parsley. To name but a few.”

“Wow.” Even I knew that stuff was poison. They’d have done the trick, all right, alone or in concert, especially if the victim was so drunk he might not even feel the symptoms, so he wouldn’t call for medical help. “And Merle drank so much, if he’d been found dead in his bed one morning no one would’ve even wondered about it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “But these guys who’ll be feeding facts to a prosecutor: will they see it that way?”

“Hmm. Probably not.” Because Ellie was right: having a variety of weapons to choose from rarely tended to exonerate a person. To the contrary, actually. I put the corned beef on a platter and began surrounding it with vegetables—
cabbage, parsnips, and beets—and set it all in the oven to keep warm.

“You’re right, Faye Anne's in it up to her neck,” I went on. “But Ellie, we still don’t have to…”

Ellie put condiments on a tray. “Get involved? Of course not. But let me tell you a little story about Faye Anne.”

Creamed horseradish, spiced grape, and homemade cranberry chutney, all in little cut-glass dishes with silver spoons in them. “Remember my mother's funeral?” she asked.

“Yes,” I ventured, unsure how sensitive Ellie still was on the topic; her mother had not been the most beloved woman in town. People came to the service, all right, partly because they adored Ellie, but mostly to assure themselves that rumors of the older woman's demise weren’t exaggerated. In the little chapel, you could almost hear them humming her funeral march: ding-dong, the witch is dead.

“Well…” Ellie began. But just then Sam burst in and with him was Tommy Pockets, an Eastport boy who had been Sam's best chum practically forever, so of course I had to invite Tommy to stay for supper.

Next Wade arrived, having prevented the boat with the bad bilge pump from sinking in the boat basin, and headed upstairs for a shower. Ellie's husband, George Valentine, came in wincing stalwartly; he’d smashed his thumb doing something or another while working out at the town's generator the evening before, but George's upper lip is so stiff that you could use it to open clams so I wasn’t sure how badly he was really injured.

And the two state guys showed up, looking shocked with the cold and even more freshly barbered than they had from a distance.

And more like bad news. I’m not going to name them, here; possibly they are perfectly nice men with wives and children, under other circumstances. But even though I put
drinks in their hands right away so they wouldn’t feel so awkward, strangers among us, both still kept glancing around as if they thought we Eastport folk might set the dogs on them.

They didn’t know that the only dog available for the purpose was in the coat closet, shivering. Which was also worrisome; Monday ordinarily seems to think it is her job to wriggle and slobber over every single person who enters the house, even if the person is wearing a burglar's mask and carrying a swag bag. Now a glum thump came from the closet as she settled; I made another mental note to take her to the vet in the morning.

Finally, when the state guys were on their second drink, Victor arrived with two women in tow: one on his arm and another clumping along behind like a dragging anchor.

“This,” he began nervously, “is…”

But I knew: Joy Abrams was a big, gorgeous woman who looked capable of crunching Victor up in her strong white teeth. She had dark violet eyes fringed by thick false eyelashes, hair the color of a sun-bleached apricot, beautifully curled and elaborately piled atop her head, and smooth hands with almond-shaped nails manicured to perfection.

“Hello.” Warmth and street smarts mingled in her smile; I liked her at once.

Standing behind her was a grim little imp of a woman with short white-blond hair, a pug nose, and nails nibbled to the quicks of her small, childish fingertips. She looked like a thirteen-year-old pressed unwillingly into joining the adults’ party.

“This is my sister Willetta,” Joy added, her tone changing to one of apology over the unexpected extra dinner guest.

“H’lo,” Willetta mumbled, sticking a small hand out. She was actually twenty or so, I thought, and Joy a few years older, though her hair and makeup made her look more mature.

Victor set a rusty pair of pliers, a near-empty roll of packing tape, and a handful of bent nails on the hall shelf where I suppose he thought I might not notice them right away.

“Come along,” he intoned. “Drinks in the dining room.”

Despite his air of command he appeared terrified, like a kid with a new toy he is sure all the others will try to take from him. Even Tommy Pockets, the boy most likely to be voted a dead ringer for Howdy Doody, earned a glare when he said hello to Joy, his voice cracking and his big ears reddening. Tommy was a fine young man, a friend through thick and thin to Sam; unfortunately, though, his ears stuck straight out from his head like teacup handles.

“Sorry they’ve sprung me on you,” Willetta told me diffidently. Her costume of blue chambray shirt, black jeans, and white canvas sneakers contrasted sharply with Joy's glamorous getup: low, white lace peasant blouse, long velvet skirt, soft suede slippers. “Victor insisted.”

Somehow I didn’t think so. And despite her appearance, Willetta was not a child: she could have refused. But never mind; at this point I had so many guests in the house, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Rose Bowl Parade had filed in behind her, seeking refreshments.

Besides, the more, the merrier: What with trying to make a party out of folks who had no more in common than the contents of a box marked “nuts & bolts assorted,” at least I would be spared further talk of murder and mayhem, for a couple of hours.

Or so I believed.

Eastport, Maine (pop. 2000)
is not only the easternmost city in the United States; it is also the smallest. But this was not always true:

In the 1800s, its port rivaled New York City's in annual shipping tonnage. Eastport boasted hotels, saloons and theatres,
a hospital, two newspapers, furniture and millinery shops, public stables, grocery and dry goods emporia, and every service and supply that was required by a prosperous coastal center of commerce and manufacture.

The manufacture being mostly shipbuilding: in those days, great wooden sailing vessels slid down the ways from every inlet and cove on the island. Even now, the notion that for a lad of good family the road to manhood lies over a tilting wooden deck on a cold, rolling sea, under a good, stiff set of wind-filled canvas sheets, is within living memory.

But as the sailing ships faded inexorably from service to be replaced by steam, their owners and builders turned their black-coated backs on the huge, ornate houses they had erected on the elm-canopied streets, decamping en masse with their wives and children to guard the capital they had created, preferably in warmer climates.